


Waterfall

by Fossarian



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2020-03-01 06:47:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18795112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fossarian/pseuds/Fossarian
Summary: Theon is still recovering from his experiences with Ramsay and Sansa tries to help him.





	Waterfall

He thinks everything is a trick now. 

Sansa can ask the simplest questions - _are you hungry? are you hurt?_ and she’s met with a blank, wide stare. It always takes Theon a little while to respond. Sansa will say something to him and she’ll see the wheels turning in his head as he tries to figure out where the trap is laid out. 

When she opens the door to his chambers he is sitting beside the fire, his gaze far off. He startles at her presence and tries to stand, but he’s still not too steady on his legs. She rushes over to him, pushes him back into his chair with far too much ease. 

“It’s all right, I’ll come to you,” she says, a smile she hopes is reassuring on her lips. 

“Lady Sansa,” he says, faintly surprised. 

Sansa likes how her name sounds when he says it. Likes it far too much. Impulsively, she reaches out and brushes the hair out of his face so she can better see his eyes. He’s always had fine eyes. Gray as the storm and just as unpredictable. When she was a little girl, Theon told her that there were no images of the god of his people, that their god drowned in the sea and was reborn and that’s where he remained. You didn’t see him until he had decided to take you with him. 

But young Sansa was not from the Iron Isles and Theon was the closest she'd ever get to the sea, and so she’d always imagined the Drowned God as Theon. Even now she can’t help but think it’s right. She remembers him laughing in the yard, laughing at all of them. There had always been something windswept and mercurial about him, one moment happy and the other violently angry. It has been so long that Sansa held these competing images of Theon - dead god, man, and water - as one and the same that it feels blasphemous to think of him as anything else. 

Had she ever had the nerve to tell Theon that, he would have found it funny. Maybe even flattering. But that is the old Theon and this one… she is not sure he would find the musings of a child very amusing at all. Or worse, he would think it was a joke at his expense. 

She doesn’t miss the way he flinches when her hand comes toward him, but he allows it. Well, he’d let anyone touch him if he thought the alternative was worse. She suppresses a sigh. 

“Why haven’t you eaten?” 

She crouches down so she doesn’t loom over him quite so much. Her father always used to come down to her when he had something serious to say. She used to be a tiny thing, her septa said, so tiny Ned and Catelyn feared for her survival. But then one summer she shot up like a beanpole, and her father didn’t have to crouch down on his knees to speak to her anymore. But she’d never forgotten the courtesy. 

She tucks the thick folds of her cloak under her knees as padding against the stone floor and looks up at Theon, trying to meet his eyes. One of his bandaged hands clenches and unclenches around the arm of the chair. He glances at his untouched food. Then at the floor. Then at the door behind Sansa. 

“Theon.” 

Sansa threads her fingers lightly through his hair, across his scalp. She feels scars and bare spots. There seems to be no part of him that isn’t damaged. It makes her angry. But she can’t show that to him right now. 

“I - um, I just wasn’t hungry,” he says. The hand gripping the armchair goes to his mouth and he starts nibbling on the skin of one of his remaining knuckles. 

“Did something happen to upset you?” 

“No,” he says, a little too quickly. His bony knees brush her shoulders as he tries to create distance between them without physically throwing her off. 

“Well, good,” Sansa says, not wanting to press the issue. 

She knows she should back off. She’d only come up to check on him and now that she has assured herself he’s not in immediate danger - missed dinners aside - she can return to her own chambers. But what was the point of jumping off that tower if she wasn’t willing to pick up the pieces after? 

Theon glances at the door again. Licks his lips. “You -” he says, then stops. 

“What?” Sansa says. 

Theon’s eyes go to her and skitter back to the floor. He twitches, starts chewing a bigger hole into his knuckle. It’s hard for Sansa not to yell at him to stop. He does a lot of odd little things that Sansa suspects he isn’t even aware of anymore. Things that helped him get through another day, another hour, with Ramsay. 

“You shouldn’t be kneeling in front of me,” he says in a quiet rush. 

“Why?” Sansa laughs. _That_ is what he’s worried about? 

“It’s just not - it’s not done.” 

He stands up abruptly and Sansa almost falls flat on her rear. It all explodes at once. Theon retreats from her, muttering “Sorry, I’m sorry” until his back hits a wall. Nowhere left to go, he slides down to the floor. He curls in on himself and starts some nonsensical litany with that godforsaken name. _Reek is like freak is like weak is like leek..._ And on and on. Until someone makes him stop. 

Watching his descent, Sansa’s mouth falls open. She’s still getting used to this. She hopes she _never_ gets used to this. 

“Theon,” she says. She can hardly hear herself over Theon’s babbling. He’s not even talking loudly, he never does. Always in a whisper or half-articulated stutter that he never finishes. But the words penetrate clean through all the same. It’s just… it’s so _persistent._

It reminds her of the dronings of the priests to the Light of the Seven. Say it enough times and eventually it will come true, or so the Southerners seem to believe. 

She crawls over to him. “Shh, shh, Theon, it’s me, stop please,” she says. She reaches for his hands, tries to pry them away from his face. 

“No more, I won’t do it anymore. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she says helplessly. And now they’re _both_ babbling idiots. Sansa’s eyes prick with tears. 

“I didn’t mean to p-push you, my lady,” Theon says. He folds his arms together and lets his shoulders hit the wall a few times before he settles into eerie stillness. 

“I know,” Sansa says. “Of course I know that. It’s nothing. I shouldn’t have gotten so close.” 

Mutely, Theon nods. 

She draws her legs up and leans against the wall with him. Pulling one of his arms straight, she rests it in her lap and slides her fingers up his sleeve. She begins gentle strokes down his arm, watching any change in his expression. 

But Theon is good at hiding his thoughts, has always been that way to some degree. Growing up with them but never being _of_ them, he had kept some secrets well to himself. As all the Starks had found out eventually. 

“Do you like this?” she says. 

Theon nods without looking at her. 

Her fingertips run along his forearm, over scars and bumps and brandings. 

Not entirely convinced, she says, “I’ll stop if you want. I’ll go away and leave you alone for the night. It’s just -” She breathes in, breathes out, chooses her words for their truth. “It always felt good when my mother did this for me when I was sick.” 

Theon mutters something and at first Sansa thinks it’s more of that hellish litany Ramsay installed in him. 

“What?” she says. 

“I don’t want you to leave.” 

It’s enough for her. More than enough. Theon rarely expresses an opinion one way or another these days. 

They sit like that for an hour, maybe more. Sansa eyes the flagon of wine on the table and Theon’s untouched dinner. Debates on pressing her luck. 

“Do you want to try to eat?” 

Theon looks at the table too. Shakes his head. 

“Why not?” Sansa says. “You have to be hungry. You’re so thin…” 

“My - my teeth hurt. It’s -” He cuts himself off but Sansa is determined now. 

“It’s what? What’s wrong?” 

Theon starts fidgeting again. He pulls his arm away from her, knees drawn up tight to his chest. A finger goes back into his mouth to chew. 

“It’s just… You sent up all my old favorite foods and I can’t - it’s hard to eat that stuff now.” 

“Oh,” Sansa says, feeling stupid. 

“I didn’t know anyone took note of foods I like,” Theon says, staring off into the distance. “Did one of the old cooks remember or something?” 

Sansa reaches up and pries Theon’s hand away from his mouth. “No, I remembered. You always liked that salted fish that no one else could ever stomach. And once you shared a bit of your lemon-raspberry cake with me and told me how far away the lemons grew. After I was finished you told me my father would go bankrupt now because I’d eaten the cake.” 

“I don’t know why you always believed everything I said,” Theon says without smiling. 

But it sounds like the old Theon, his tone one of disbelief that anyone in his presence could be so foolish. 

“Well, I was six!” Sansa says, so relieved that Theon was talking that she would have let him curse every branch in the Stark family tree if that was what it took. “And anyway, you were always telling tales. How was I to know the truth from everything else?” 

In her girlhood, Theon had mostly ignored her as befitted an annoying little surrogate sister, and the rest of the household had ignored _him._ Everyone except Robb, who had seemed to gravitate to the very darkness in Theon that everyone else was repelled by. 

It hurts to think of Robb. If he was alive, he would have burned everything down from Winterfell to King’s Landing to rescue them. 

He almost did. 

But knowing he could not, it had helped, Sansa supposes, knowing they must rescue themselves. 

“I lied a lot,” Theon says, his fingers twitching in Sansa’s hold. “About stupid things. Things I didn’t even need to lie about. Robb would catch me and get really angry and then he’d hit me and then it was all better. Until I did something else stupid.” 

A gray cast starts to take hold over Theon’s eyes again and Sansa shakes him a little. _No, don’t go back there._

“Well, we all of us have been stupid, it’s a wonder the gods let us live as long as we have.” 

“Yes,” is all Theon says. 

Sansa plucks restlessly at the hem of Theon’s coat. Turning her mind to practical matters, she says, “About the food. Would soup do all right? I can have the cook put the fish in a nice broth and all the little fruits can be cut up like a salad. Or whatever else you like,” Sansa adds quickly. “And I will find you some milk of the poppy so you can rest. Would you like that?” 

“That’s too much trouble for me, my lady,” Theon says. His hair has fallen back across his face and Sansa is struck by the thought, _Thank God he didn’t take his eyes_. Without them, Sansa would be as lost as a sailor without the stars. 

“It’s no trouble at all, don’t be foolish,” she says. She stands up and encourages Theon to do the same, grasping his mangled hands around her own pale, slender ones. 

He’s like a colt, all long limbs and unsteadiness. She’ll remedy that, too. She will fix everything. The North will be free once again and her family safe and Theon will stop looking at her like the sun rises and sets on her whim. He will smile and he will laugh like he used to, and if Sansa has to tear down all the walls of Westeros to amuse him, she will do that as well. 

“I will have dinner with you, is that fine?” Sansa says. Never mind that she has already eaten. 

“Of course,” Theon says. She doubts he would have said anything else, but she likes to think he would say that even if he wasn’t afraid of everything. 

She sends for a maid and the food is corrected. After his panic, he looks more tired than he did before and he doesn’t say much. But that’s all right by Sansa and she keeps up a steady flow of conversation that doesn’t require a lot of taxation on the listener. She had learned this skill both as a lady of the North and a hostage of King’s Landing, how to be entertaining without obtrusive. 

Sansa pours him wine and gets a strange pleasure from it. She sets his plate out and makes sure the goblet never runs empty. When a little shiver wracks through Theon's frame she gets up and fetches him a blanket. After Joffrey and Ramsay as husbands, she never would have thought she could enjoy serving a man again. 

“You’re good to me,” Theon says. 

“I try,” Sansa says meekly, fearing that there is no real way to repay someone for risking life and what’s left of limb and sanity to save you. 

_The sea belongs to itself_ , something whispers in the dark of her thoughts, and the voice does not seem to be hers but it's right all the same. All of this fighting and all of this talk of this or that king and House, and who owns what, and nothing has felt more important to Sansa than making sure Theon gets enough to eat. 

And nothing about that feels wrong.


End file.
